A popular piece of content-creation/email writing advice is to “Write to your past self”.

What people mean when they say it is to think about where you were 2 months ago, 2 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Then think about all the problems you faced, obstacles you had to overcome, and wrong beliefs you held. And address those. This way you write as if you were writing a note that was about to be put in a time capsule and sent to your past self.

It sounds great in theory. It really does.

I used to follow the same advice myself.

But I stopped.

The first reason for this is simple:

I can’t remember what my past self used to struggle with. And even if I could, I don’t understand the feelings that accompanied them. My whole perspective is different now than it was even 5 months ago.

It’d be foolish of me if I tried talking to that specific person.

And that’s exactly why the creator economy is so great. You learn from the people 1–2 steps ahead of you, not someone 5 whole years ahead of you—another popular piece of advice.

So if you learn from someone right in front of you, why would I write to someone way behind me? It doesn’t make sense.

Another reason is that I simply can’t be bothered anymore.

The advice my past self from 5 years previous would need doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m at a different level right now. I’m interested in other topics.

If I were to talk about topics that didn’t inspire me, then my content would be bland and uninspiring, which directly hurts you, the reader. The energy wouldn’t be the same anymore.

So I simply don’t speak to my past self.

I write about what I currently find interesting. What I’m discovering in real-time.

This makes my content interesting and engaging. And I can take you with me on an adventure. A real-time adventure you can see unfold right in front of you.

Neither you nor I know the ending. Nobody knows where we’ll end up. That’s what makes it all so exciting.

So let this be a reminder not to blindly follow every single piece of advice you get. Think for yourself, carefully judge everything you hear, see, and experience.

Then decide what’s best for you and your goals.

And if you decide building an audience that loves to listen to you, longs to follow you on your adventure, and wants to buy your products is what’s best for you and your goals. Then you might want to check out Email Valhalla: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

I don’t often talk about this, but I used to be the president of my fraternity about 3 years ago back at university.

(The uni/student culture in Belgium is quite different here, so it’s not exactly a fraternity—a lot more “professional” for one—but that’s the best explanation I can give in just a few words, so let’s stick to that terminology for now)

One of the events we organized was a mentorship-type program where (close to) graduating students get in touch with working professionals in the field to help them figure out what to do and where to go after graduation.

A lot of fun and a lot of help for many students.

Anyway.

During this event, the alumni would start by giving a quick elevator-ish pitch about who they are, where they work, and what they do.

One guy we invited (and accepted) to join as a mentor had started his own company where he builds software infrastructure aimed at helping other maritime transport businesses digitalize the tracking and monitoring of their supply chains.

He gave his pitch in a very corporate and professional manner—almost like a consultant would present his solution presentation to his clients.

Another mentor who joined the event was one of Belgium’s leading experts in explainable AI who, at that time, still worked in the IT department of one of the biggest Belgian banks.

His pitch was the exact opposite of the first guy.

Instead of going for the professional and consultant-like approach, he went for the informal and student-culture type of talk—cracking jokes, making fun, talking about the exciting trips and after-work parties (which may or may not involve lots of drinking).

And this made me think.

At the end of the day, they both share the same type of information (who they are, what they do, where they work). But the way they presented themselves and, by extension, the type of person they were talking to, they were completely different.

Same information, different target audience.

Now I’m not saying one is better or worse than the other.

It all depends on who they were speaking to and what they hoped would happen. Maybe the first guy wanted to attract high-quality profiles to hire for his own while the second guy simply wanted to attract a wide range of students to get a recruitment bonus.

Or maybe I’m completely wrong on that and it was nothing more than the personalities of both those people.

Who knows?

What I do know is that there’s always a million ways to position the same (and I mean the EXACT same) information to a thousand different audiences.

And if you’d like to learn more about how to speak to your target audience, specifically through email, then you might want to check out Email Valhalla.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

I’ve been working on creating a new inexpensive SLO/tripwire to offer to new subscribers as well as a good lead magnet for a new market I plan on entering.

One of the main attributes I want to focus on with this new product is to make it highly insightful, easy to consume, and, most importantly, make it entertaining and “fun”.

Simply said, I want to make it a great product instead of merely a good one.

Some might say this is overkill for such a low-ticket product.

To those I might say their long-term vision isn’t clear enough—perhaps it’s blocked because of their unhealthy obsession staring at spreadsheets all day, more focusing on the numbers rather than the actual people they’re dealing with, and turning business into a maths competition.

Either way.

To make this a reality I’ve been heavily looking at other products I bought, appreciated, went over many times, and enjoyed the process from start to finish. All this to figure out what aspects determine the “enjoyment” of a bought product.

A sort of reverse engineering if you like.

I realized early on that the best place to learn about this is to look at subscriptions.

Why exactly subscriptions?

Well, because they have to deal with huge amounts of churn every single billing cycle. So a good subscription offer has to be entertaining and fun, almost by design. No matter how “valuable”, how “insightful”, or how “life-changing”, if it doesn’t entertain (there exist many forms of entertainment) the user—the paying customer—then they’ll eventually cancel their subscription.

That’s what separates the great (subscription) offers from the bad or the “merely good” ones.

Anyway.

So far I’ve distilled it down to 3 main aspects.

But, since I’m curious to know what you think, let’s make a deal:

I’ll share with you the 3 main aspects that determine whether a product is great or merely good and how to implement them into your (next or current) offer I’ve discovered.

All I ask in return is for you to reply to this email to tell me about one (or more, feel free to share whatever you want) offer you bought in the past that you thought was great. One that you’d easily recommend to other people as well and one you sincerely enjoyed.

Feel free to share your own thoughts and ideas about why that product was a great one instead of a merely good one and what about it you enjoyed so much.

Sounds like a deal?

Alright then.

Simply reply to this email in the next 24 hours after it went out and I’ll get back to you with my findings.

Let’s jump straight into it:

• Your job isn’t to educate, it’s to entertain & promote

• Email daily—nobody ever made less money by more frequently speaking to their customers, entertaining them, and letting them know about your offers

• Don’t be boring—being boring is the biggest sin in all of marketing

• Screw perfection, embrace your flawed self

• Actively try to find the limits of everything you do (and see whether you can cross them)

• Nobody likes an expert as they do a leader

• Write like you talk—accent, grammar mistakes, and typical speech patterns alike

• Share stories and share’em often

• Answer the questions you receive publicly

• Be a real person, share your opinions (especially, but not limited to, the controversial ones)

• Join the Email Valhalla supremacist fangroup.

Every single one of these has made me more than you could ever imagine.

But who am I to tell you what to do?

So as with anything, test them out for yourself and see how it goes.

And about that last one…

…more information about Email Valhalla, and how to build a better email business, can be found here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

I’m always working on something.

Whether it’s writing an email, reworking a sales page for the 10th time, crafting a new offer, batching social media content, working with clients, or updating a product I made a while ago.

This might look overwhelming to many people.

More.

Some might fall into the trap of working on their stuff indefinitely, trying to get it “just perfect”.

Yet this is the least productive task you could probably spend your time on.

That 100th revision won’t make the difference. That one typo you fixed in your 2,117-word email won’t make you more money. That logo you redesigned won’t magically land you more clients.

Creating more content, launching more offers, and talking to more people. Now that will make you more money.

Which brings the question: how do you handle saying to yourself “it’s good enough” and just go with it.

My answer?

Public deadlines.

See, I’m a big procrastinator.

Always have been and always will be. I never get anything done unless it’s absolutely necessary. This has put me in a lot of trouble in the past. But it didn’t need to.

I realized it last year that I could use this to my advantage.

How?

By setting deadlines.

Whether artificial or real—setting deadlines is the secret to getting things done. Especially for a procrastinator—they get extra productive when those deadlines come close.

So imagine I have to write an email that has to be published by 8pm.

There’s no way I’m procrastinating on that one when the clock strikes 7.30. Neither will I avoid researching a topic for a coaching call an hour before I’m supposed to hop on the call.

But there’s one problem.

What if there is no deadline?

Imagine if you wanted to launch your newsletter or create and sell a new product. It’s your own project. You don’t have a boss to tell you when something is due.

But you do have (potential) customers, readers, followers, or whatever you call the people who like your stuff.

The solution?

You announce that you’ll be launching a new product before you even start creating it. Tell your followers that your course will launch in 2 weeks. Even stronger. Announce that your product is available for early purchase at a discounted price.

Now you have no choice but to 1) create a sales page 2) write those promotional emails 3) create a curriculum 4) design your product 5) figure out your pricing and most importantly 6) get everything done in 2 weeks.

No time to mess around. No time to procrastinate. And no chance for you to “keep gathering information and not take action”.

Now I’m sure this might not be possible with everything in life.

But so far I’ve found a way to apply this trick to everything that’s functional and important in my life.

Try it out for yourself and see how much you can truly get done in a short amount of time.

On another note.

If you’d like to discover my framework for writing high-converting emails that keep your readers engaged and coming back each and every day, without having to spend hours writing them (in fact, you could easily start writing emails in less than 5–10 minutes), then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Something to think about:

As a general rule of thumb, I believe that everything "for the masses" is dumbed down, lacks refinement, and is devoid of intrinsic meaning, value, or thought (that goes for everything from movies, music, and yes, even (especially) the stuff you learn from your favorite big-name guru or whatever’s written inside that New York Times bestseller everyone’s been yapping about for years).

Let me clarify.

Everyone’s different in some way or another.

Everyone has different likes, believes, interests, tastes, opinions, and many other things that shape a person into who they are. Whether this is because of their surroundings, their genes, or something else entirely doesn’t matter in this case.

People are different, and there’s no getting around it.

We, as a species, simply can’t collectively agree with anything (even with this statement—proving the point in the process, as paradoxical as that sounds).

So, to circle back to why this matters, if people are all different, and they can’t agree with anything, then everything that’s trying to appeal to as many people as possible (aka, anything that gets a lot of attention and praise by tons of people—which is always by designs, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise) has to be made as general, as widely accepted, and as simple as possible.

Or in other words.

It has to be dumbed down to the point where it’s (almost—nothing is absolute) devoid of value for any single individual—no matter the lie they tell themself or the lies other people/society are instilling into them (cognitive dissonance is one hell of a force, I’m telling you).

There’s a lot going on here.

Many forces are at play.

Each of which could arm me with many, many emails to talk about each of them in detail.

This email is one of the least precise, and most vague ones I’ve written in a while, by design, because of the nature of the topic.

As with anything, if any of this tickled your fancy, got you interested in something, both positive or negative, whether you agree with what I wrote or not, I advise you to go do some research on your own.

Educate yourself on the words and principles talked about in this email (as well as those I haven’t mentioned), come up with a hypothesis of what’s going on on your own, try to test & design some theories. Then finally see how they stack up with the examples you come across.

Or don’t and just reply with an angry email telling me I’m wrong because you said so—that seems to be what the cool kids do nowadays.

But enough about that.

I don’t have anything to offer to you that’s “for the masses”. Instead I have useful, valuable, and insightful training information that’ll help you write better converting emails to grow your list and sell more products (or services, whatever floats your goats), especially for those who run a business on their own and are looking to scale their business beyond what they’re already doing.

You can find out more about that by clicking this link: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

At least not your ideal customers.

For one, everything useful can be found online for free. There’s no arguing about that. Even more. All of the most useful pieces of information are already known by your customers, your readers, and almost everyone else in the market.

So people aren’t buying value.

They’re buying adventure, cool tips and tricks, exciting so-called “secrets”(which are nothing more than gimmicks that only make up 1%–2% of the final outcome—and which won’t help anyone who doesn’t already have the foundation down), and most importantly, they buy a new perspective, or in other words, new insights.

This is what those “give everything away for free” people are missing (what’s free isn’t being valued, let alone used and implement) as well as the people who swear you need to hard teach, educate, and share as much “value” as you possible can.

Spoiler, you don’t.

Just take a look at my emails (or anyone else running a successful business you admire for that matter). I’m not teaching you how to do stuff (at least not for free).

I’m sharing tips with you every single day, yes.

But not about how to do something.

I’m sharing tips about what to think about, how to look at the things going on in your market, new ways you might consider approaching opportunities you have, or other insightful realizations that lead you towards better knowing what to focus on (as opposed to a step-by-step plan on how to do something).

Speaking about how-to content.

If, by any chance (no idea why that would happen), made the realization, or gotten the insights, that, perhaps, building a list and writing daily emails to better build a relationship with your ideal customer, write better, more targeted content, and sell more high-quality products, and getting thanked for it by your customer, if you realized that might be a good way to go about things…

Then do check out Email Valhalla where I do indeed teach more about the exact steps you can take to do exactly that.

Tickles your fancy?

Then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Here’s a weird observation I made recently:

The more responsibility I take on, aka the more stuff I have to do each and every day, the more work I get done each and every day.

Which, while reading it right now, you might think “uh, yeah, no shit Sherlock.”

But if you’d look at every productivity book out there or listen to any so-called productivity experts, you’ll always hear the same advice of only taking on a couple (2 or 3) of tasks each day, as to not to overwhelm you with the amount of stuff you have to do—for which the reasoning is, the more stuff you do, the more stress you have, the less stuff you get done, so you better take on less responsibility and make sure to only do the important stuff.

But that’s not at all what I found to be true in my own life.

In my experience, it goes something like this:

The less I have to do, the more time I have to do these things, the lazier I am, the less I do, and then because of that laziness I sometimes even procrastinate on those 2 or 3 important things I was supposed to do.

That’s something that, once again, never ever happened to me when I had a lot, some might even say way too much, stuff on my plate.

In that case, I knew there was no time to fuck around, no time to be lazy, and I’d get to work all day every day

Resulting in me getting ten times as much stuff throughout the day as I would otherwise.

Goes to show you to not blindly trust other people’s advice and test things out for yourself.

Anyway.

I thought this might be an interesting observation to share with you.

Speaking of which.

Another observation I made is that people who bought Email Valhalla have, on average, a much more successful business and write much better converting emails that make sales and keep their readers engaged and wanting more.

If you’d like to learn more about Email Valhalla, then click here now: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Today I received a sponsor request from some newsletter (which I won’t name for obvious reasons) about using AI to grow your LinkedIn account.

I immediately declined it—no hesitation whatsoever.

But it did get me thinking.

What’s the deal with the latest obsession about everything AI? Why does everything you do, including everything you create, everything that’s personal, has meaning, stands for something, everything that’s priceless in a way, has to be replaced (or at least, people try to replace it) with AI?

It’ll only end up being a cheap knock-off, without any intrinsic meaning, without any deeper intention behind it, without any soul.

Sure use AI were it makes sense.

In fact, we’ve already been using AI for decades in many use cases across countless of domains. Only then people still knew what AI actually meant and nobody was fanboying about it as if it’s the second coming of Christ.

But that aside, why on Earth, would you want to use AI to replace the creative things people do?

And even then, if you’re trying to use AI to grow your LinkedIn brand or whatever, then you clearly haven’t thought about what it means to “build a brand” or what the purpose of trying to grow (anything) on LinkedIn even is.

Spoiler: it’s not to fill a spreadsheet.

Not to mention what’ll become of your reputation if you use AI to do all of your ‘dirty work’ (yes it’s that obvious, and that soulless).

And last but not least.

If you honestly think of growing your brand (or anything else for that matter) as ‘dirty work’ you’d rather outsource to AI (or someone else), then, sorry not sorry, you might be in the wrong business and there’s nothing here for you in the first place.

In case this triggers you. Good.

It’s meant to do so.

I’d much rather you get triggered now, feel hurt, attacked, and shamed by what you’re doing (or what you were planning on doing) while risking you hating me and leaving my list for good (always free to do so), than playing nice, not daring to bring this up, making sure you feel cosy and comfortable, never understanding that ChatGPTing your way to building a brand, creating content, selling products, never to have any success whatsoever, not realizing you were doomed to fail from the very start.

That said, I’m not 100% shitting on AI.

As I said, it does have its use cases.

Mainly internal things you’ve got going on. Use it to transcribe audio recordings you made while on a walk or on a meeting. Use it to summarize those same records or other reports you (or other people) made. Maybe even use it to automate the tracking and reporting of your finances or how you’re spending your time.

But for the love of everything that’s holy.

Don’t use it for anything creative (it’ll single-handedly ruin your ability to be creative in the ways that matter) and god forbid you use it to create any form of final product your customers, readers, listeners, fans, or whoever will ever see.

In short, if it sees daylight (either in the form of an end result or a skill you’re practicing), don’t use AI.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn how to create content, build a brand, and write emails that have soul and meaning in them, then you might want to check out Email Valhalla.

You can do so here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Adding to yesterday’s email of realizing the people who engage with your content aren’t the people who most enjoy it, there’s something else, something highly valuable and important, I thought about.

It didn’t exactly fit the theme and adding it to yesterday’s email would only make things more complicated.

Plus I found it valuable enough to give it its own email.

So here it is:

Being liked doesn’t matter, being respected does.

See, many people want to be liked (which goes hand in hand with getting a lot of engagement on their posts). They’re constantly in need of getting confirmation that what they’re doing is good, and they’re sharing awesome stuff. They want people to tell them how much they love what they’re doing and thank them all the time.

Get them a few naysayers and all hell breaks loose.

I hate to break it to you though, but ‘being’ liked doesn’t pay the bills. Being respected does.

What this means is, people will give compliments to the guy they like, they’ll engage with him, reply to all his stuff, and tell him how amazing his content is, but when it gets down to actually taking out their credit cards and buying some new product they’ve been eyeing for a while, they’ll always purchase from the guy they respect rather than the one they like.

In fact, there’s something to be said that your biggest haters and dislikes are actually your most valuable customers, but that’s something for another time.

Now, I don’t know about you but I’d rather be respected than liked if it meant actually getting paid (in real-life money, not imaginary likes or thank you’s) for what I do.

So how do you go about it?

Well, there are many ways to be respected.

But if I were to name one, just one, that you could start doing today, without any issues, without much work, that’ll have an almost immediate effect, and will keep increasing its effect until nobody dares not to respect you, let alone compete with you, for months, years, even decades (not saying you’ll have to do it for decades, just showing you the absolute power of this), then it would have to be, without a doubt, the act of mailing your list daily, showing up day after day, showing who’s the boss, sharing something every day, never taking any shit, proving you know your shit, and doing it your way.

I know, it ain’t exciting.

It’s nothing new.

But it’s by far the best, most effective, and, dare I say, fastest way to become respected instead of merely being liked (something that isn’t as valuable as you might think at first).

Anyway.

To learn more about the most effective way to send daily emails, build up a reputation, show your readers you know your shit, and do it in a manner that’s easy, simple, and doesn’t take any time whatsoever, but has massive effects for you, both in the short-run as in the long-run, then check out Email Valhalla.

Click here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla